12 Year-Old Scratch Coding Camps

Kids learning to code need a personalized approach to keep learning year-round and to be challenged at the right level. They don’t need another one week, one-size-fits-all summer camp!

Summer is an excellent opportunity for kids to code – more hours are available to discover new interests and dive deep on their passions. For this reason, kids coding summer camps are extremely popular.

Year-round Breakout Mentors offers one-on-one mentoring. Each child is carefully matched with a Computer Science student at Stanford, UC Berkeley, or Santa Clara University by personality and interests to ensure the right mentor fit. They hold weekly 90 minute sessions where the mentor constantly adjusts the difficulty and introduces new concepts as the student is ready. Students are proud of their personalized games and itching to keep learning.

During the summer we also offer a personalized camp option. Our mentors travel to the student’s home to work with a group of up to four friends, typically three hours a day for one week. We design a custom offering based on the group’s experience and interests. The perfect way to have fun and learn a ton!

Hear From a Student

Scratch For Kids Learning to Code

Breakout Mentors often starts 12 year-old students with Scratch to learn programming fundamentals – we are currently working with 29 kids in Scratch across the Bay Area. Scratch provides a friendly learning environment with graphics to allow your child to explore the extent of their creativity.

At the end of the very first session, each student will have an exciting game they created. The mentor focuses on a limited set of commands to allow kids to think about problem-solving like a computer scientist and become comfortable with concepts like loops, conditionals, and variables. Kids love making their own versions of games, including the classic game Space Invaders. Mentors encourage the students to add their own creative features, like speeding up the enemies after reaching 10 points.

As students progress, mentors are able to introduce more advanced concepts and encourage increasingly complex projects. 12 Year-Olds who work with Breakout Mentors over months and years will eventually move from Scratch to a language they type like Java or Python.

What Parents Say

Breakout Mentors was exactly what we were looking for when our 11 year old son asked to learn programming. He connected quickly with his mentor, who has taught him things beyond our knowledge. After his last session, he tried to explain to me some aspect of the programming he just learned and then said ‘I feel so proud of myself.’ We are proud of him too and thankful for Breakout Mentors.

Father of 6th grade boy in Palo Alto

Breakout Mentors did a wonderful job matching my daughter with a mentor – she is perfect! My daughter told me that she learned more from one session than her last 3 summer camps combined. She was so excited! Thank you – this is exactly what we were looking for!

Mother of 12 year old girl in Berkeley

We just passed our second anniversary with Breakout Mentors. Our 12-year-old son has had two mentors and they’ve both been terrific: enthusiastic, knowledgeable, professional, and patient. They’ve been great about building a curriculum on the fly around his interests and keeping him engaged and learning. Highly recommended.

Father of 7th grade boy in Santa Clara

My son was interested in coding from a very young age. We have tons of books at home, however, only starting with Breakout Mentors actually helped my son to build on his interest and develop some skills. The lessons are fun and introduce serious programming concepts in a way kids can grasp. My son started with programming games in Scratch. Moving from little projects to bigger and more complex ones, he has learned the basics of programming and now is moving to Java. He shows me his work after each lesson since he is very proud of his accomplishments and can’t wait to show them off.